Danielle has driven from Los Angeles to Vegas several times before, in the Crazy Years, but she is always amazed by the raw isolation of the desert between. Once out of LA – and so sprawling is that city that it takes them ninety minutes to escape it – the only town they pass is Barstow, halfway. Two enormous casinos stand like Scylla and Charybdis at the Nevada border, for those gamblers who can't be bothered to drive the remaining hour to Vegas. The highway itself is wide and busy, a long smooth strand of civilization that occasionally knots itself into little roadside clusters of buildings that provide, as the signs say, GAS FOOD LODGING. But mostly the road traverses a vast trackless wasteland, the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, occupied only by cacti, Joshua trees, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and the occasional desert hermit. Danielle wonders how many lives this pitiless desert swallowed before the age of the automobile. Surely thousands.

Las Vegas would be surreal anywhere. After a five-hour desert drive, their drive up the neon canyon wonderland called the Strip is nearly overwhelming. They pass a pyramid, a compressed New York City, a fantasyland castle, a gigantic green cube, an Eiffel Tower, a Roman coliseum, an erupting volcano, a pirate ship, all of them larger than life. Huge crowds flood the Strip like army ants. Traffic moves slower than pedestrians. The sun is setting as they arrive, but its shine is soon replaced by multicoloured neon that will dazzle the throngs of drivers and pedestrians until dawn. Vegas never sleeps.

"I never imagined a place like this could exist," Jayalitha says, eyes wide.

"Read the subtext before you get excited," Keiran warns her. "All hail the great god Mammon. Thou shalt have no other god before me. Sell thy father and thy mother. Covet thy neighbour's wife and donkey."

"Don't be so cynical," Danielle says. "It's just a playground. Disneyland for adults."

"More like a carnival of lost souls. Gambling is just a means of relieving the statistically incompetent of their money. The house always wins."

DefCon is hosted by the Alexis Park Resort, a large hotel east of the Strip, across from the Hard Rock Café. It is almost unique in Vegas in that it has no gambling, not even slot machines. They originally claimed to be full when Danielle called, but Danielle knows that hotels always keep a few rooms in reserve in case of disaster or a VIP appearance. By the simple expedient of claiming that she was verifying a reservation, rather than arranging a new one, and then flying into feigned outrage when they reported they had no record of her previous booking, she managed to annex a superior suite for a standard price.

The heat hits Danielle like a slap in the face when she gets out of the car. It is night, but it is also July in the desert. It reminds her of India. She hurries into the plush and air-conditioned lobby. The lobby's ATM machines have already been hacked to display DefCon's happy-face-and-crossbones logo and cartoon pictures of geeks at computers. She makes a mental note not to use them.

There is a crowd around the check-in desk. Their most common features are thinness, paleness, multicoloured hair, black clothing, tattoos, laptop cases, and a large number of flashy electrical accessories. There are more men than women, but the disparity isn't as great as Danielle expected, and the men aren't as social-outcast geeky as Mulligan. It is a subculture of anarchists more than rejects.

She and Jayalitha get the keys, return to parking, and escort Keiran to the room. He wears a black hood that conceals his face; Keiran is well enough known in the hacker community that the odds of being recognized are good, and Danielle is sure a few of his fellow hackers would be rather pleased by the prospect of reporting him to the FBI. As a result, he will have to spend almost all of DefCon in their room, and wear a hood if and when it is necessary for him to emerge.

The Alexis Park occupies nearly a square mile of space. Past the main building on Harmon Street that contains the lobby, restaurant, and conference rooms, a walkway weaves its way through an outdoor common area a hundred feet wide and a quarter-mile long, decorated with swimming pools, palm trees, and fake rocks. The guest rooms are found on either side of this central corridor, in two arrays of long, low, motel-ish buildings. Their perfectly adequate suite is near the third and last swimming pool. Danielle and Jayalitha go out again, to get food from a Subway down the street. By the time they return Keiran has assembled the laptops and other gear loaned by Mulligan: computers, screens, antennae, black boxes, and less comprehensible electronica, all interconnected by a spaghetti chaos of cables. The resulting nexus of computing power looks like the control center for a mid-sized NASA mission.

Danielle watches Keiran and his total immersion in his cyberworld. It is bizarre, and awe-inspiring, and more than a little frightening, that he can do so much, create identities, shut down whole cities, from almost anywhere, with nothing but unparallelled knowledge and a few keystrokes. She wonders if maybe the rise of the Internet, and this resulting age of interconnection, is a global disaster waiting to happen.

"So now we walk around and hope you call P2 when we're in sight?" Danielle asks.

Keiran frowns. "I like to think the plan is slightly more sophisticated."

"Doesn't seem like it."

"Again we start with one piece of information. His phone number. Now, when a mobile phone is on, it constantly transmits its location to its network, so it can be informed of call requests. I assume P2 keeps his phone on in case of some Shadbold-related emergency. I'll hack into the local Sprint network, they're the Virgin Mobile carrier, and at any given time I should be able to triangulate his location to within about a hundred-foot radius. The same way he found us in that car park. When you two are confident you have a good view of everywhere he might be, I give him a ring. We won't get more than a couple of chances. Maybe only one before he gets suspicious and switches phones. So don't fuck up."

"Your managerial style needs work," Danielle says.

"Common side effect of misanthropy. It will most likely take me until midnight to own the Sprint network completely and figure out the triangulation. You two should spend that time figuring out the local geography. But watch out. Federal marshals come to DefCon too. Techie types, mostly, but a Russian bloke was arrested here two years ago just for presenting a paper."

"Great. And you want me to walk around down there, with my picture on the Most Wanted list."

"Don't exaggerate. We're not on the Most Wanted list. Not yet. And you look nothing like that picture any more. Believe me, the federales have plenty to distract them. Just don't attract attention. If you find anyone called Trurl or Klaupactus, bring them up here, they're trustworthy, I can use their help. Otherwise just stay quiet and get the lay of the land."

** *

The land in question is strange and unforgettable and costs 80 cash dollars to enter. The heart of DefCon is arguably the after-hours even in individual rooms, or the all-night-every-night pool party, but its public face, in the Alexis Park's convention area, is no less colourful. As Danielle and Jayalitha enter they pass the Wall Of Shame, where the username and passwords of those foolish enough to use unprotected wireless connections anywhere near the hotel are displayed on a huge scrolling screen. In a cavernous room next door, a banner proclaims that the "WarGamez Capture The Flag" hacking contest is in full swing; around it, a dozen teams of hackers hunch over their laptops, typing and talking furiously.

The hallways and meeting rooms are full of people wearing translucent green DefCon badges, their demography white and young, ranging from teens to mid-fifties but skewing heavily towards the former. Dress is mostly casual-decrepitude or counterculture-black over punk hair and tattoos. Hiptops like Keiran's are present by the dozen. Two camera crews rove around, presumably filming for TV or documentaries. Jayalitha and Danielle make sure to give them a very wide berth.

They pass a talk on "Bluetooth Vulnerabilities", which Danielle now feels qualified to talk about. A pretty teenage girl is giving out "personal firewalls", which turn out to be condoms. In the Vendor's Room, the Jesus Phreakers and the Culture Junkies sell T-shirts and stickers with sayings like "I read your email" and "Norton cannot protect you." In another room, eight fearsome locks are lined up for a Lockpick Challenge; according to the leaderboard, the record time for picking all eight is less than a minute. Outside, a convoy is a grouping for something called a "Wi-Fi Shootout" that involves lots of vehicles with mounted satellite dishes and people carrying elaborate homemade shotgun antennas that look disturbingly military. Danielle decides to stay indoors for now, and blend in with the largest crowds.

"You know what I heard?" she hears a teenage voice say. "I heard fuckin' LoTek was here." Danielle freezes for a moment, until the voice continues "Someone said they saw him out by the pool with this hot supermodel chick. Like, in your face, FBI."

"That's fucking cool," the acne-scarred kid's girlfriend says, as they pass by, wearing matching black I SAW YOUR MOM ON THE INTERNET T-shirts. Clearly just an unfounded rumour. If an extremely unhelpful one. Keiran's hacker-scene living-legend status doesn't make their life any easier, especially if the feds take that rumour seriously and decide to, say, search the entire hotel.

"Idiots," she hears another man say after the teenagers have passed, and looks over to see a man of about thirty, with pale skin beneath a thick shock of black hair, talking to a muscular bald man. The speaker's accent is Eastern European, and he wears an expression of sour anger. "LoTek would not dare show his face here. He is not stupid. The marshals are everywhere, and never mind what they say, they are looking for him, just as they are taking pictures of us all, fingerprints, DNA, to go into their files, which you can be sure they keep offline. Go on, laugh. You think they are not?"

"It would be illegal and inadmissible," the bald man points out. Danielle notices that he wears a single brass knuckle on his right hand; half-decoration, half-weapon.

"Of course it would. You think the police don't do illegal things? These are hacker police. They bend the rules just as we do. They circumvent imposed limits. They perform illegal acts to secretly lay the way for their legal investigations. As they should. The rules they work under are stupid. I hope they do catch most of the people here and jail them for life. They would be doing the world a favour. Script kiddies, wannabes, has-beens. Take them away, who is left? Maybe ten of us. I myself will not come next year. DefCon is a useless, pretentious waste."

"You said exactly that last year," the bald man observes, amused. "I think I have a recording. But yes, I don't think we'll see LoTek this year. He won't risk jail just to defend the Lockpick Challenge title. He doesn't come to learn, no one here but the CDC, the Legion, and maybe you and Klaupactus can teach him anything. He comes for the parties, and if he can't show his face, why risk attendance?"

"You say maybe me?" the Eastern European man demanded. "LoTek is very good, yes. Overall better than me, I concede this. But George, I assure you, there are fields in which my knowledge far outstrips his. And your knowledge as well. As you well know. I hate your kind of false humility."

"Of course you do. You hate everything."

"Not true. It only seems that way because the world is so detestable. Is there some reason you feel the need to eavesdrop?" the Eastern European man demands of Danielle and Jayalitha, who have slowly approached.

"It's just, we're looking for a man named Klaupactus," Danielle says.

"We heard you speak his name," Jayalitha clarifies.

The dark-haired man snorts. "Spot the feds," he says contemptuously.

The bald man looks at Jayalitha. "No, I don't think so. They don't hire foreign nationals. And that's a real Indian accent, yes?"

"Yes," Jayalitha says.

The bald man nods. "I did a year of research in Bombay. What do you want with Klaupactus?"

"Him and Trurl," Danielle says. "We, we have a message for them."

"This is Trurl," the bald man says, pointing to his companion.

Trurl sighs. "Tell me your message," he says, his tone of voice indicating that he would like to get this interaction over with as quickly as possible.

"I am afraid the message is for your ears only," Jayalitha says, and looks apologetically at the much friendlier bald man.

"Don't be ridiculous," Trurl snaps. "This man is one of the three people in this world I trust, and I will tell him your message the moment you give it to me. Please do not insult my intelligence by insinuating unnecessary inefficiency into this conversation."

Danielle hesitates, and decides to take the risk; from what they heard, the bald man too is a friend. "LoTek would like to talk to you."

"Please," Trurl says scornfully. "Do not waste my time."

"I'm not."

Trurl and the bald man search their expressions for a moment. Then, his voice much less hostile, Trurl says, "You must be joking."

"You see anybody laughing?" Danielle asks.

"He's really here?"

"Come," Jayalitha says. "We will show you."

** *

"You have balls like bronze basketballs, my friend," Trurl says as he shakes Keiran's hand. "You know they are here looking for you."

Keiran shrugs. "Never mind the federal agents. We have bigger problems."

"Oh? What problems?"

"People who play by no rules at all. Details are need-to-know. But I could use your help."

"Klaupactus and I are at your service."

"The handle P2 mean anything to you?"

Trurl frowns. "I think so. Some script kiddie. Years ago. Hung out in chat rooms."

"He's no longer a script kiddie. He's very, very good, he has access to tools like none of us have ever seen, and he's working for the bad guys."

"I thought we were the bad guys."

"No such luck," Keiran says.

"That is a problem."

"If you two could just start some social engineering. Mention his name a lot, see who seems interested. Try and lure him someplace tomorrow night. Then I'll ring his number, I've got that, and we'll see who answers the call of the vibrating pocket."

"Then what?" Trurl asks.

"Then we buy a Taser from the back of some vendor's van."

Trurl's eyebrows shoot up. "You understand, when I say I will help, this does not include committing physical violence."

"That's what Charlie has his angels for," Keiran says, nodding to Danielle and Jayalitha.

"Charlie doesn't watch it," Danielle says sourly, "his angels will test his Taser on him first."

"I will bring Klaupactus," Trurl says. "I'm sure he will be happy to see you. Anything makes that fool happy."

** *

Klaupactus is a tall, athletic man in his thirties who looks like he'd be more at home in a kayak or climbing a sheer rock wall than in front of a computer. Long dark hair and 80s-style stubble surround a perpetual smile. His accent is a weird combination of Romanian and Australian.

"This is bloody ridiculous!" he exclaims. "As if you would build a bomb. You shouldn't hide from the government. You should attack them with a lawsuit. For tens of millions. Harrassment, false arrest, libel, character assassination. I have lawyer friends who would be gagging to represent you."

Keiran nods. "I'll be happy to, once this situation is resolved."

"Have you finished with the triangulation?"

"Almost. I have to write a couple new utilities to map it onto the local GIS in real time. But I've already established the phone's location somewhere on the hotel grounds. Our friend P2 is definitely here. And he took a ten-minute phone call within the last hour."

"Did you intercept the call?"

"Of course. But it was encrypted."

Trurl raises his eyebrows. "A secure anonymous phone?"

"Our opponents have enough money to buy this whole hotel and everyone in it."

"Money," Klaupactus says dismissively. "You know what I say about money. Happiness can never be bought. It can only be stolen."

"Very pithy. Now go find my archenemy for me, will you?"

"It will be a pleasure," Klaupactus says.

"Pleasure," Trurl mutters. "I suppose at least it is a welcome distraction from the rest of these idiots."

** *

Danielle and Jayalitha steer clear of Trurl and Klaupactus when they venture out into DefCon once more: those two are trying to attract P2's attention, but Danielle, fearful of being recognized behind her mask of blonde hair and makeup, wants to avoid just that.

At about midnight, tired from the long drive and the overload of sensory stimulation, they return to the hotel room. Keiran is already asleep in a cot by his improvised near-science-fiction control center. The three largest screens show top, side, and front architectural plans of the Alexis Park grounds, with a reddish cloud that Danielle takes to indicate the possible location of P2's phone.

After a moment she realizes that the edge of this cloud intersects this very room. Their quarry is somewhere within two hundred feet of them right now. Unfortunately some four thousand other DefCon attendees are as well. As she watches, the cloud shifts slightly; P2 is on the move. Maybe going to some party. Maybe hunting them just as they are seeking him. If he has overheard Trurl and Klaupactus talking about him, it is not a great logical jump to the conclusion that Keiran – LoTek – is here.

But she can't worry about that now. Danielle has too much to worry about, and she has to put it all away every night, or she will never be able to sleep. It isn't easy. She has learned she has to exhaust herself every day, or she will be up for hours, sweating and tense, brooding about her possible futures, all of which are bad. But tonight she is too tired to worry. She closes her eyes gratefully and allows sleep to carry her away.

Keiran shakes her awake at four in the morning.

"Come on," he says urgently. "I've got a fix. I know where P2 is. You have to go get him right now."